Week Fourteen - Milestones

Four important milestones this week:

1. Today the medical program is half completed.

I have mixed feelings about this – part happy that it’s half over; perhaps a bigger part is sad that it’s half over. I feel like I have so much more to learn, so many skills to practice. Three more months doesn’t seem like enough time.

2. Tomorrow I get to eat my first solid ‘meal’ in three months.

This is wonderful. This coming week is the first of five weeks of transition to solid food. Week T1 will be three Optifast shakes and one ‘meal’ consisting of 3 oz protein and 1 cup non-starchy vegetables. I think the keys here will be planning, simple ‘meals’, and avoiding food cues /'high-risk' foods. The last three months have been very easy – lots of thinking and talking about food, but the only choice has been chocolate or vanilla.  There have been no real cravings or difficult food choices – the next three months will be very full of all this, and it’s scary.  In case you're wondering, my first 'meal' will be Thai chicken broth soup - no noodles and no coconut milk, but lots of vegetables with a small rice paper wrapper with julienned veggies.  This seems like a wonderful way to 'break' 'fast'.

3. Today I weighed 165 lbs.

That’s a loss of 45 pounds. over 3 months, and 65 pounds over 19 months. I feel really good – much fitter and more energized than before. I have been very pleasantly surprised by how much weight I’ve lost. Based on the "15 to 20 percent of starting weight" that I was told at the start, I was conservatively expecting to reach 180 lbs and desperately hoping to reach 170 lbs. Now I’m beginning to think that I might even get to 155 lbs – at that point I would move from ‘overweight’ to ‘normal’ on the BMI charts! I can kind of relate to people with anorexia – feeling like ‘just a few more pounds’ and I’m good. I’ve got to really focus on the fact that I feel wonderful, and even if I don’t lose another pound I could be happy here for life. I might even put the scales in the spare room for a while.

4. Three weeks before we head out for mountain climbing.

I’m really looking forward to this time with friends to celebrate the healthy habits I’ve adopted for the second half of my life. I’m really hoping that I’ll be able to climb (and get back down) this 4,000+ mountain. It will be a real test of my fitness, and an estimate of how well I’ll be able to do hiking the Peninne Way and Hadrian’s Wall next year.

All very exciting stuff.